Saturday, January 31, 2015

The battle of Waterloo is one of the
most analysed, or more accurately over analysed campaigns and battles of all
time. In fact we have an incontestable surfeit of accounts of the campaign and
battle.

The great military historian J.F.C.
Fuller has it largely right when he says:

The Waterloo
Campaign has been so thoroughly investigated and criticized that the errors
committed in it are apt to appear exceptional and glaring. They were not, they
were the usual errors found in most campaigns.1

The
chief reasons that the campaign generated such a storm of writing were that it
ended the career of one of the greatest of military leaders of all time and
further that it brought into conflict the two most capable military leaders of
the time. In this case Napoleon and Wellington.